


Assurance

by Hotei (corvuscorona)



Series: Assurance [1]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: Crying, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sharing a Bed, i'm sooooo fucking predictable, it's feel good. don't worry. i'm here to help, spoilers up through late november
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2017-06-07
Packaged: 2018-11-10 08:39:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11123685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corvuscorona/pseuds/Hotei
Summary: Akira has successfully faked his death, and the Phantom Thieves are on their way to their shocking comeback. While the plan went off without a hitch, there's no denying it's been nerve-racking, and although it could be argued the worst is behind them, that kind of argument isn't always enough to salve the heart.





	Assurance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PMcrunchwrap](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PMcrunchwrap/gifts).



> Listen. This is corvuscorona. I haven't even finished this game yet, but this fic Quite Literally came to me in a dream and I couldn't not write it.
> 
> Unbetad, because I wanted to see what PMcrunchwrap would do if I wrote and posted an entire P5 fic without telling her. Please enjoy. Also, help me.

~~~~A week after they escape Sae’s palace and their plan is thrown into frantic, chaotic action, Akira is idling away time on a Saturday when he receives a text from Yusuke that simply states _I’d like to come by Leblanc_.

He sits up straighter where he’s been lounging on the sofa, browsing the news, and checks the time in disbelief. Schools’s out already—just barely. He can’t believe he’s gotten this good at wasting time.

_For coffee?_

_That, too_ , Yusuke replies, and he grins. So many of his friends have been coming by Leblanc lately for business that he’s almost started to feel the place belongs more to the Phantom Thieves than to Sojiro. Shido’s been taking up all the space in their heads, and he feels like he hasn’t had time to think about anything else. He knows Yusuke hasn’t had time to paint. Whatever’s possessing him to come and visit alone in what little free time he has, Akira’s grateful for it.

Morgana, who has been dozing on the other end of the sofa, perks his head up. “What are you so happy about,” he mumbles.

“Nothing.” He types _Bring something cool_ , and stands. “Yusuke’s coming over.”

Morgana stretches and settles back in, tail flicking lazily. “That’s good. You probably need a break.”

It’s a welcome reprieve from the constant prodding about Phantom Thieves business. Although he feels a little unsettled sitting around when they could be in Shido’s palace within the half hour, Morgana’s probably right.

He’s been meaning to talk to Yusuke, anyway, although he’s still not sure about what. When he’d made his triumphant return and his friends had seen their work paid off, Yusuke’s reaction was the most subdued of all. Over the months, Akira has decrypted the formula: when Yusuke’s unhappy about something, you’ll _hear_ about it. As for excitement, sometimes he seems worried it’s beneath him.

But he’s been watching Akira intently, the way Makoto does when he’s talking Phantom Thieves business, except that he’ll catch him at odd moments. When everyone else is glued to the news; while they’re traipsing across the city, lost in thought—even that first night, while they attempted to catch Sojiro up, it was the same. Yusuke’s so distant by nature Akira’s never been surprised to catch him with his eyes unfocused, half-listening, at seemingly random moments. This is different. His attention is pointed, and when Akira meets his gaze he’ll smile slightly before looking away, appearing satisfied.

To be fair, the chances of Akira being shot had been pretty high.

He wonders whether that’s it. At times Yusuke seems to be tethered to reality by nothing more than a thin cord, and he’s come to rely on Akira more often than not to be his liaison. What goes through his head, though, Akira usually finds he can only vaguely guess.

He’s talking coffee blends with Sojiro when Yusuke walks through the door, and he’s no closer even to knowing whether he wants to bring it up.

“Welcome home,” he says instead. Yusuke smiles serenely at the joke, and takes the seat next to him at the counter. “Boss says he’ll brew you something you haven’t tried yet.”

“Do you kids call me that when I’m not around, too?” Sojiro shakes his head and turns to consider the shelves of coffee.

“All the time,” Yusuke says. Then he slides something to Akira across the countertop.

Surprisingly, it’s not an art book or even a DVD that he’s brought, but a game, some late entry into the library for the ancient console Akira bought at the secondhand shop, according to him. “It’s renowned for its visual style,” he explains as they drink their coffee, and his anticipation is tangible. “I thought you might have some interesting insight.”

The thing about video games, other than that Akira plays them, is that Yusuke really doesn’t. At the silent implication that he’s meant to be the technical window through which the artist views the art, a grin assails his face. “I bought snacks.”

Yusuke’s smile is more subdued. But in accordance with the formula, he follows eagerly up the stairs, and moves the sofa to face the TV while Akira turns everything on.

They play until their eyes hurt, and Yusuke takes actual, physical notes. When Akira glances over, he mostly sees sketches, and arrows pointing here and there with abbreviated commentary scrawled at their roots. Yusuke makes him pause every so often and talks through stuff like color theory, and seems impressed by Akira’s gentle reminders that there are only, like, fifty five unique colors on the whole system to begin with.

The light fades, and Akira gradually realizes Morgana has ceased commentating and instead fallen asleep on the seat between them. His focus is broken.

“You hungry?” he asks preemptively, not only because he knows Yusuke is but also because he looks cold, somehow, even sitting six feet from the space heater in his winter uniform. He keeps moving like he’s going to crack his knuckles and stopping halfway through, squeezing his fingers thoughtfully before going back to fiddling with his pencil, elbows tucked close to his sides.

They’ve done this so many times, the way he smiles at Akira in response is almost sly. “I wouldn’t want to impose.”

Akira punches him in the arm. “Shut up and come on.”

Under the influence of Akira’s (Sojiro’s) curry, Yusuke always seems to unfurl like a blooming tea. His movements seem looser, his face more expressive, his voice louder. He’s like this with most food, Akira has learned. They’ve been to the diner together, and that sushi place, and then there was the hot pot. At the time, he thought he’d never seen another person so happy to see food. And he was probably right, but then he saw Yusuke eat curry.

“I don’t want to go,” Yusuke admits while in this state, sounding wistful. Maybe it’s the weather, or the way games like the one they’ve been playing seem to chew through hours in minutes, or maybe he’s just feeling sentimental. He’s never once asked to stay since that first time, even obliquely.

Akira rolls the bottom edge of his empty cup across the table, thinking hard about his answer. He hasn’t come close to bringing up current events, and still isn’t sure he wants to. Now that he’s really thinking about it, though, he realizes how different he feels after a day spent doing things that aren’t life-threatening.

Sojiro’s gone already, and the thought of Yusuke getting on the train and leaving fills Akira with a strangely potent melancholy. “You sound like you think you have to,” is what he ends up saying, when he’s mulled over this feeling for long enough.

There’s a competitive kind of spirit, a powerful glimmer that comes into Yusuke’s eyes from time to time when he paints, or studies, or talks about art, about things he knows and loves and wants Akira to understand. It’s the same look that lights up his face now.

“Don’t I?”

That’s all he needs to hear. There are hardly any dishes to wash, but Yusuke stands in the tiny kitchen with him while he does them anyway, reaching across him to drop a forgotten spoon in the sink with his usual disregard for Akira’s personal space. He does things like this—sits flush against Akira on the train, turns his face manually towards distant sights, poses him when he inevitably models for sketches—so frequently that Akira can’t remember the last time he felt anything but comfortable about them.

When everything in the café is put away and clean, and the sofa upstairs is back where it goes and Yusuke’s busied himself gathering the scattered snack detritus back into the plastic bag, Akira turns to rummaging through his clean laundry.

“I didn’t really plan ahead for this,” Yusuke says as he retrieves a Jagabee cup that’s rolled under the table. “Still, sleeping in my clothes is a small price to pay for the privilege of watching over you, Joker.”

“Don’t.” _There_ are his other pajamas. They’re wrinkled as hell, but smell nice as he shakes them out.

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t sleep in your clothes. Take these,” he says, and as he hands them over Yusuke looks bemused. “You can go down and change first, if you want. Oh, wait.”

“Thank you,” Yusuke says quietly, but Akira is already halfway across the room again, hunting down the spare toothbrush he’s been meaning to swap with his old one. It’s still in the box.

“Take this, too.” He tosses it, and it lands on top of the clothes. Yusuke looks a little awed. But he goes. Akira collects his own stuff into a pile, then flips back the covers on his bed and moves his pillow closer to the wall.

Then he stops.

Slowly, he turns over his shoulder to look at the sofa. It looks smaller than he remembered, somehow, and even as he tries to correct the course his mind was on a moment ago, the baseless, almost childish assumption that Yusuke would share his bed, the memory of him folding himself into that narrow space fills Akira with unprecedented feelings of guilt.

He turns back to the bed, and frowns at it, and makes an executive decision.

When Yusuke comes back up the stairs, Akira has just barely confirmed the lack of weird smells on the spare pillow he’s unearthed; he hurls it hastily across the room, where it lands in the space exposed by the turned back covers. “Get comfy.” He says it casually as he scoops up his own pajamas, but what he feels is determination so powerful he can tell even in the moment it’s only a defense mechanism. Nerves sparked in his stomach the second he saw Yusuke’s face again, and he probes them cautiously as he descends to the bathroom.

What’s the point of holding back, now that he’s not only a Phantom Thief but dead on top of that? Why should he feel uncertain? He’s never had a friendship defined by such close, casual ease in his life, and suddenly he realizes that that’s exactly what he’s been missing for the last week and a half. He pulls the shirt on over his head and then leans back against the bathroom's wall in bewilderment, testing out the idea. More than ever he wishes he had a window into Yusuke’s thoughts. None of his own are making him feel any better; his heart is hammering now. It’s completely unfair. Girls probably sleep in each other’s beds all the damn time. He resolves to interrogate Ann about it later, but for now there’s no going back on what he’s already done.

Except that there is. When he comes back from the bathroom, clothes tucked under his arm, Yusuke has found a spare blanket somewhere under his own power and set himself up on the couch; he’s looking nonchalantly at his phone. Akira stops short.

“That’s actually not what I meant,” he says automatically, and immediately feels like an idiot. Despite all his uncertainty, he realizes all of a sudden that he sort of thought they were closer than this, and his heart drops into his stomach. Yusuke is looking at him, and although it’s hard to tell without his glasses on, he seems nonplussed. It takes him a moment to answer.

“This is more comfortable than it looks, I assure you.”

“Um,” Akira says, setting his clothes down and fighting the urge to cover his eyes. He says the first thing that comes into his head. “You’re way too tall for that thing.” Stupid. “It’s not even really meant for sleeping on; it kind of hurt seeing you do it the first time.”

“Oh.” Yusuke sits up slowly, letting his bare feet drop to the floor half-draped in blanket. Akira wasn’t expecting to have to talk about this. He’s not sure what he was expecting. Assent, maybe; the easy agreement and comfort he’s come to associate with Yusuke automatically. Maybe he was expecting him to read his mind. It seems, though, that Yusuke didn’t even consider the bed an option. “Then…”

Akira’s hot with embarrassment, but he has to resolve this somehow. “I meant,” he forces out, and he sounds so much steadier than he feels, he can hear it in his voice, “even with me in it, there’s more room in my bed.”

It’s out there now, and he has to lean into it, so he approaches Yusuke where he sits and extends a hand. “How about it?”

Yusuke stares at him. And then he lifts up a fistful of blanket, slowly, and presses it into Akira’s hand as he stands. “In that case,” he says, and Akira is too keyed up to decipher his tone but he sounds anything but upset, “we can both use this.”

“I mean, you did get it out already.” Akira bends down to scoop up the rest of the blanket, and to briefly hide his smile as relief washes through him. Yusuke watches him as he carries it to the bed and spreads it over his own.

“That’s poetic, isn’t it?” Akira gives Yusuke a questioning look, already half under the covers. Yusuke clarifies: “Two renegades sharing their body heat on a cold winter’s night, secret hideout and all…”

It’s a really, really weird way to put it, but it’s not even close to the weirdest thing he’s ever said, and anyway it’s pushed almost immediately from Akira’s mind as Yusuke climbs into bed next to him, and he can’t believe he didn’t take the damn hint in the first place, because he lays down facing Akira even closer than the size of the mattress requires. If he didn’t understand before, he must be determined to make sure Akira knows he does now.

“So? Get comfy.” Akira wrangles the blankets around their feet and shoulders, and Yusuke folds himself into the space like he’s been sleeping here all his life. His hands and feet are shockingly cold. “What the fuck, you’re frozen,” Akira complains, and somehow an instinct bypasses most of his brain and he hooks an ankle around one of Yusuke’s to pull his foot closer. He meets with no resistance, and suddenly everything about this feels so _normal_. “My room’s not even that cold; are you like this all the time?”

Yusuke fixes him with a wide-eyed stare of genuine surprise, and with his face so close Akira can see it perfectly even in the limited light filtering in through the window. It tugs insistently at his heart, and he’s thrown caution to the wind already, so he wraps an arm around him too, trapping both cold hands in between their chests.

 _Girls probably don’t do this that often, actually,_ says a voice in his head. He ignores it.

“I don’t really think about it,” Yusuke is saying, settling easily into the touch. “Don’t you get cold? It is November, after all.”

“Not in my own home, if I can help it, come on. What do I have a space heater for?”

“Just because the _space_ is warm,” Yusuke starts to say, but whatever elaboration he was planning is scattered all of a sudden by quiet laughter Akira can’t hold back. He’s not sure why he feels this way all of a sudden, so incongruously comfortable as to be almost giddy. Listening to Yusuke construct sentences in his deliberate way, the way they come out so uniquely identifiable to him, the way he always does it, Akira feels his concerns from moments ago disappear. It’s a light feeling, muddied only slightly by the thought of what he’s interrupting. If he could shut himself up, he’d probably get to listen to him talk all night, but the realization that he’d want to only makes him laugh harder. The look on Yusuke’s face, of course, is worth it—it’s worth anything, to watch him try and puzzle out whether he’s supposed to act offended or start laughing, himself.

“Don’t worry,” Akira assures him, when his face has started to hurt and Yusuke’s smile has won out in full. He scoops his hand around the back of Yusuke’s head and pulls it close to his chest, half in jest and half in another fit of genuine affection. They’re already here, after all. “I’m not making fun of you.” With the hand that’s already slung across Yusuke’s body, he pats idly at his back.

“I’m not a child,” is what he says in reply, and as always his voice sounds graver than Akira knows he really means to be.

“Nah, you’re more like an alien.” At this Yusuke shoves his shoulder playfully, dislodging him a little.  Where his thumb brushes Akira’s collarbone, it’s no longer quite so cold. “Or something. You know, from somewhere with different rules. I love listening to you talk.”

He says it without really thinking, and once his brain catches up to his mouth there’s an instant of blinding anxiety until he realizes that Yusuke is moving gradually closer again, restoring the same comfortable position they’d been laying in. Again he wonders what’s going on inside Yusuke’s head in that moment, but besides being suddenly hyper-attuned to him, trying to pick up on some minute clue, he feels strangely calm. Even when Yusuke snakes an arm around his waist, his nerves spark and sing but his heart remains steady.

The moment hangs suspended, undisturbed, for what feels like a long time. But eventually Yusuke draws in an audible breath and says “hey,” and suddenly Akira can feel eyelashes brushing against the side of his neck rapidly, and Yusuke’s breath hits an uneven rhythm as he comes alive with emotion that wrings recognition out of Akira’s chest. He’s seen Yusuke close to tears before, but this somehow reminds him more of himself. In the way he fights quietly to control himself, balls a hand too tight in the back of Akira’s shirt, there’s a silent plea, an intangible ward against loss that might slip through his fingers at any moment. It’s not safe to think about it head-on.

Or maybe he’s projecting. But whatever Yusuke’s thinking, he reminds Akira powerfully in that moment of a very particular brand of desperation, and the eyelashes are wet against his skin, now. He’s wished countless times, not in words but in a wordless aching feeling in his chest, for someone who could assure him he was enough to keep his friends safe. Morgana does, sometimes.  But it never lasts long, and the warm knot of a cat sleeping against his back or his side is nothing like this. He’s not sure what possesses him to start stroking Yusuke’s hair, and as he begins to hear soft gasping noises in between the silent sobs he remains unsure of whether it’s doing any good, but he has to do something. His heart has caught up to the rest of him now and it feels like it’s going to jump out of his chest. Maybe if he holds him close enough, one of them will start to believe nothing could go wrong.

Yusuke shudders against him for a while, crying with hardly a sound. Akira remains silent, waiting for the right words to appear miraculously to one of them, completely incapable of summoning them. It takes a long time for the heaving of Yusuke’s chest to ease.

“I’m glad you’re here,” is what he says, finally, when he has his breath back, voice weak but deliberate against Akira’s chest. He releases his shirt and maneuvers a hand in between them, wiping at his cheeks almost frantically.  He presses the fabric of his too-short sleeve briefly against his nose, but then seeming to realize what he’s done pulls it away just as quickly, wrinkling his brow in apparent embarrassment. “I’m sorry.”

Impulsively, Akira pulls his face close and presses a lingering kiss to his forehead. Yusuke’s eyes must flutter closed, because when he pulls back they’re shut against the moonlight, and it shimmers on his lashes and the tears he’s missed in his haste. Akira blindly grabs a tissue from the windowsill behind him and moves to dab at them, but at the first touch of the thing on his cheek Yusuke snatches it from his hand.

“I’m glad you’re here, too,” is all he says as Yusuke fixes his face. He hopes whatever it is that he’s feeling comes through. _I’m glad I’m not dead. I’m glad you’re not dead. I’m glad you’re not cold anymore._

There’s no discussion after this, not really. He gets the feeling, strangely certain and comforting in his chest, that there doesn’t need to be. They chat about everyday things without moving, a strong agreement to hang on to one another going unvoiced. Morgana, at some point, emerges from the woodwork to leap onto the bed and curl up behind Akira’s legs.

Yusuke starts to fall asleep with his head tucked under Akira’s chin, trailing off in the middle of a sentence, starting up again, trailing off. Akira strokes a hand down his back experimentally. He’s barely awake enough to move, but he pulls himself infinitesimally closer, and Akira’s heart aches. It feels warm and impossibly full, and his arm keeps moving of its own accord; Yusuke sighs against the fabric of his shirt, and says no more. _Invite him over for hot pot,_ says a voice in Akira’s head he’s inclined to agree with, as he starts to fall asleep himself, hardly realizing. _Sit by the heater. Go to the bathhouse. Buy him oden at the convenience store,_ it says, _steamed buns and hot coffee, give him your scarf, hold his hand, sleep just like this._ At some point he drifts off, and the voice becomes a dream, and all night between the two warm bodies of boy and cat, the dream is all Akira sees.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a big stupid boner for that indirect "Japanese Literary" style of love confession. Is that what's going on here? I still haven't decided, but you better BELIEVE that's where this dialogue came from.
> 
> Small continuity edit 06/07 8pm


End file.
